Pi: inserting USB stick causes a reboot

I’ve joined the ranks of RISC OS Pi users and have been impressed by the polished state of the OS and package generally (I got mine as a ‘turnkey’ device from CJE in a VESA case). It sits out of sight on the back of the monitor and is KVM’d with a Win7 PC. The OS version is 5.21 dated 25-Feb-14. Behaviour is generally stable, but,
1. repeated left/right keypresses causes a repeating loop which only Alt-Break and a reboot cures;
2. inserting a USB stick causes a reboot. Is this ‘normal’ behaviour?

1. repeated left/right keypresses causes a repeating loop which only Alt-Break and a reboot cures;

Chris Evans will no doubt advise on specifics, but the more recent 5.21 versions have a fix for the “key bounce” behaviour.

1. repeated left/right keypresses causes a repeating loop which only Alt-Break and a reboot cures;

Stuck keys are a fairly common problem. Sometimes it’s attributed to using an inadequate power supply, other times it looks like it’s problems with the USB driver. Some improvements to the USB drivers have been made in the past couple of weeks, so you might want to try using the latest development ROM image and see if it’s any better.

2. inserting a USB stick causes a reboot. Is this ‘normal’ behaviour?

This one will almost certainly be down to using an inadequate power supply (or perhaps the finger of blame should be pointed at the Pi foundation for creating such a flakey hardware design). Try a different power supply if you have one, and/or check the voltage across the test points on the board. Or try using a powered USB hub – it’s possible the stick is simply trying to use more power than the Pi is designed to supply.